Archive for the ‘Feature’ Category

Premiered by George Fifield in 1999, the Boston Cyberarts Festival was launched with generous seed funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. The biennial event is the only festival in the world inclusive to all art forms–both visual and performing, film, video, electronic, literature, public art and web art.

The 7th Annual Boston Cyberarts Festival

The 7th Annual Boston Cyberarts Festival occurs April 22 – May 8, 2011, and with so many happenings coming together as a single occasion there is much to hear and see, like the work of the Urbano Project, an organization run thought MIT’s Urban Arts Institute. Heidi Kayser, who is an artist-in-resident and youth programmer for the Urbano Project says that “Urbano’s mission is to facilitate public art in public spaces.”

“In achieving this, the youth involved of all ages have 5 different programs they can be a part of,” she says.

The Axiom Center for New Experimental Media presenting an exhibition curated by Kayser entitled Move Me: An exhibition of Contemporary Kinetic Sculpture. Brandeis University will also have a presence at this year’s festival, presenting the “BEAMS Electonic Music Marathon,” which features electronic and computer sounds by an international roster of musicians and composers on April 30th from noon till midnight.

“Dreamtime” by Tom Haney (Image: Tom Haney and Boston Cyberarts)

Having a focus on digital art, this year more than 50 events and exhibitions will be showcased. An excerpt from a recent press release reads:

Speaking to some of the audio/visual events, like “The Get Together” and “Cyber-Pool,” which combines installations and performances. Fifield says, “One of the distinctive features of the Boston Cyberarts Festival has always been its inclusiveness… from the beginning we have sought out events and exhibitions in all art forms, including not just visual art but a variety of performing arts as well.”

In an special interview, Fifield shared more of his thoughts on this year’s line-up of events.

***

Max Eternity (ME): George, there’s one event that I want to ask about first, The Egyptian Oracle.

George Fifield (GF): The Egyptian Oracle – it’s a virtual reality project, which will be an archaeological accurate moment in Egypt, with an Egyptian high priest avatar controlled by an engineer. The audience can interact, asking questions.

Virtual reality is different from augmented reality. The institute of Contemporary art is going to be filled with augmented reality art. So it’s like this, when you put virtuality in real space, you can look at that real space through your smart phone, for instance, and the augmented reality will show up. Manifest.art is doing this project.

ME: Could you talk about what Greenway Conservancy is doing?

GF: The Greenway Conservancy is on blocks of what’s being called “occupation forces”… little signs and symbols. You will see standing around the symbols, little tiny spacemen that have taken over the planet, but nobody knows it because they are invisible.

ME: That’s curious. And there’s also a Festival of Art, Science and Technology.

GF: Yes. This year’s festival coincides with the 150th anniversary of MIT. They are doing a conference on dance and technology, and the other [event] is a daylong event with Autopinie–the founder of sky art. He’s doing one of his sky art sculptures.

ME: Wow, that sounds really interesting. And finally, tell me about the show you curated, “Drawing with Code: Works from the Anne and Michael Spalter Collection”?

GF: I used to be curator of new media there for 13 years. I met this couple who lives in Providence, collecting this work for the last 17 or 18 years; focusing on the early days–graphic prints from people who were working on mainframes and punch cards. This was the time when you said your work was made on the computer. But then, people said if the computer is doing it, then who are you?

Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake, Daniele Laposky and Ken Nolton were some of those people in the 1950’s.

This show is one of a number of shows that talks about our history, because It’s important to have some discussion about the history. The Goethe institute is showing a collection of early German art.

ME: I do think it’s important to tell some of these historic back stories, especially when talking about how digital and new media arrived in its present state.

GF: This idea of balancing the most cutting-edge, with history, is always important to me.
The art world is finally paying attention to these pioneers. Computers were thought of as so differently back then.

“Way back, when Walt Disney came out with the movies in theater…the first time I saw Tinkerbelle go up to the screen …I decided I wanted to do that” says Bonny Lhotka of one of the early experiences that inspired her as a child to grow up and become an artist. Lhotka, who graduated in 1964 from Bradley University–having been schooled in printmaking and painting–did just that. She became an artist, and has since gone on to exhibit her unique form of digital and mixed-media prints worldwide.

Lhotka’s art has been commissioned by and/or resides in the collection of several hundred patrons, including United Airlines, Lucent Technologies, Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab and The U.S. Department of State.

She is the winner of a Smithsonian/Computerworld Technology in the Arts Award, and in 1997 Lhotka organized Digital Atelier: A printmaking studio for the 21st Century at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, which included her being an artist-in-residence there for 21 days.

Last year Lhotka exhibited at Walker Fine Art in a group show and this year will exhibit solo there in an exhibit entitled Horizons , and over the six months via email, post mail and phone conversation, she took the time to share her heart’s artistic passion—the pulse of her life’s work.

Bonny Lhotka’s Digital Alchemy

Max Eternity (ME): Hi Bonny, thanks for taking the time to speak to me on behalf of The Huffington Post and AD MAG.

Bonny Lhotka (BL): I’m glad to do it. That’s a very nice magazine you have online.

ME: I want to ask about your early beginnings as a traditional artist, then how you became a digital artist. What inspired you to be an artist?

BL: Way back, when Walt Disney came out with the movies in the theater. The first time I saw Tinkerbelle go up to the screen and the image fell out of the brush, I decided I wanted to do that. The other thing was a field trip to the art institute of Chicago. I saw an exhibition of Seurat, Cezanne and Monet. Seeing those original oils in person, I remember that to this day. That luscious surface as opposed to what I had seen in a book. I was just drawn to that.

My training in college was in printmaking and painting. I did acrylic and collograph prints, and oil painting. I worked like that through 1990. Then in the Denver, the art market plummeted. There were no sale, little interest. I decided I would give up my studio, or expand and create something beyond traditional media. At that time HP [Hewlett Packard] had come out with the first color printer. When I saw a print at a MacWorld convention in San Francisco, I knew at that moment the direction I wanted to go.

At MacWorld I figured out what I needed to go that route; it was about 1992.

Had life been different, I would have ended up being an accountant or going into medical research. At one point I thought to be a speech therapist. But it made more sense to stick to my training in fine art.

ME: How did you go from there? What did you start out doing first?

BL: I heard about a workshop that Dorothy Krause was giving called Beyond the Digital Print. It was a workshop combining traditional printmaking with inkjet. I met Dorothy and Karen Schminke. The three of us from that day on began a collaboration to gain access to equipment and test it for fine art applications.

We have written hundreds of articles about the research. Even today we continue to explore; getting feedback to artists and companies of what we’d like to see in the next generation of hardware.

I think what’s important is that none of us liked the straight digital print, so because we came from the traditional background we were missing that experience. That’s what drove us to create all these new techniques of mixing traditional and digital.

“Party Friends”

ME: In the past we have referred to artists who work in multiple mediums as multi-disciplined artists. But a few years back I came up with the term TADAE, which stands for Traditional And Digital Artist Engineer, because it occurred to me that some artists weren’t just working in a variety of media, they had also become entrepreneurs, writers, programmers, engineers, inventors, editors, publishers, educators and the like. You’re working on a book right now. You’re also an inventor, and you’ve got your own line of products, called DASS.

BL: I’m an inventor and I apply my creativity to get to where I want to go. I see an end vision—working backwards to a starting point. I draw on common everyday observation in material and experience to find a solution to create the image that I’m after. When I wanted my digital prints to look like they were on plaster, I researched frescos, how they were made; the chemistry of it. I applied that research with what I had in my kitchen, putting together the gelatin and calcium carbonate. I found that any liquid I could convert to a gelatin state, I could lay [a print] on it and the image would move to the gelatin. You could never do this with an inkjet.

That gelatin can be made with marble dust, sand, ground up gravel, and other things.

So it’s that treating the inkjet print on film as the plate. That would be parallel to a traditional ink plate, which can be treated a variety of ways, making part of it scraped away to create one of a kind pieces of artwork.

ME: But of course, as you probably know the art world can be sometimes be a very conservative place, often resisting change. Have you experience with this?

BL: I still think there’s a resistance today amongst collectors thinking of digital prints of something of value.

We had our first exhibit of digital prints in 1994 at Sandy Carson Gallery. It was the most people she had ever had at an opening. And when we did the event at the Smithsonian, people show up angry and hostile, saying that it was not art. The curators didn’t know what to think.

ME: So, has this mentality changed at all? What’s stopping collectors from taking digital prints as seriously as they should?

BL: [sighs] The ease at which an artist can use the editioning process, and the lack of a guarantee, it’s just too easy to make them. And I think that’s what has driven me to combine the hands-on, because the digital part of it is just a step to get to where I’m going.

ME: Art forgeries are historically legendary. There’s the real possibility of fakes, with oil paintings and other traditional media?

BE: It’s a lot harder to fake an oil in quantity.

I have seen very few signed limited edition digital prints, and certainly photography is 98% of the market. And photographers have never really limited what they did. So fine art artists are fighting that paradigm set up by photographers.

Certainly, prior to digital imaging, artist could only integrate photography into collage or a transfer method that was very toxic, similar to what Rauschenberg did. Artists were sampling and collaging from newspapers and magazines.

What I find very curious is that 5 years ago I had an an exhibit in Denver, to discover i had been voted the best experimental photographer in Denver. And I was like okay, I’m a photographer? That is hung around my neck that I’m a photographer, but i don’t know why, because I’m not a photographer.

I think it’s strange how the marketplace has to put a tag on someone.

ME: So how do we work to remedy this?

BE: When we first started i came up with the term unique edition. That edition was an edition of a one-of-a-kind print that came from the same matrix of the computer. And, I will say that with my cured ink flatbed printers, there is a difference how the artwork is perceived. These prints are much more accepted by collectors. They commission them.

ME: But many fakes do exist with traditional media, so doesn’t it go back to trusting the dealer and the artist for authenticity?

BE: Yes, that’s what it’s about. You have to know who you’re buying from.

I’ve heard stories of traditional artist signing blank pieces of paper, later to be printed by whomever.

Me. Yes, me too—specifically about Salvador Dali being one of the ones who was supposedly notorious for doing this. Okay…so, tell me about your new book.

It’s strictly process; it will not tell people how to be artists. I’m just giving people tools to go beyond that digital print.

“Blue Memories”

ME: Anything else new and exciting happening?

BL: A gallery in Denver, Walker Fine Art, will have an exhibition that I’m in, and that work will be new work with lasers–laser flatbed. I’ve taken these transfer techniques, where i can get my digital image on wood or metal. I sent that to the laser and it transfers that into a print. Also I’ve devolved a process of putting digital images on crystal colorless glass, which look like daguerreotype. There’s an example of those to be in my book.

ME: You have some very informative tutorial podcasts on Youtube, many of which I’ve seen. Great ideas, it’s very inspiring.

BL: Taking really old photography to contemporary media, it’s really unique. Every day I get up is a new dawn, and I never have a plan. Something starts.

I’m a little like a canoe in a fast floating river. When I hit a rock, I just go the other way. My mother said I collect solutions for problems I don’t have.

Technology is all around, in abundance. And some might even complain there too much technology at our avail. As with a tsunami or hurricane which turns the positive benefits of water into a destructive force, what good are stores filled with pricey techno-tools if those who most need it can’t afford to buy it?

Digital literacy is not always de jour, because in the world of technology, you have to pay to play. Computers and broadband access cost money, and for those on fixed incomes, very low-income or no income, participating online can sometimes seem next to impossible.

Some non-profit organizations are addressing this issue.

In a neighborhood close to San Francisco’s City Hall is the Western Addition Community Technology Center. It’s a place of community devoted to using digital photography, art and technology to transform and heal the lives of young and old alike.

At WACTC one can learn how to build a resume, use computers to learn about genealogy, search online for jobs, edit digital photos, paint in Adobe Photoshop, troubleshoot computer problems and develop a host of other useful skills.

Felton Cogell is the center’s director, and in a recent group discussion, he and a few of the center’s clients shared their thoughts about the WACTC.

Felton Cogell (FC): During the late 1990’s with President Clinton, he allocated so many dollars, because he felt there was going to be a digital divide. Many states had money, so we got support from the feds, the state and the city to open the center.

ME: How did you get involved—why?

I’ve been seeking out this type of work since the late 90’s. I had worked as a network administrator, and when I realized how much I knew, I felt like this is what I wanted to do. A friend who knew me thought I would be a good fit, but they had hired someone already. So I tried to get the next position; taking a position as an instructor. Then I got promoted, working with seniors—the elderly. I realized then that everyone works at a different rate, in a different way.

ME: So, tell me about your connection to technology and creativity.

FC: I’ve been a photographer for 40 years. I’ve always had that artistic edge in me. I’ve never been school trained, but I’ve been painting for many years. I’d been using Photoshop for several years—growing along with it. So, I teach courses that I have a lot of interest in.

I also teach genealogy.

I’m doing the things I like to do. It’s not work. I’ve established some great relationships. A lot of people have come here to learn.

ME: How do you describe the digital divide?

It’s people who don’t have access to the digital world by having a computer at home that’s working, and having access to the internet. They miss out in those two areas; not able to come home and practice. A lot of homework has to be done online. So, that affects homework, because there’s not computers and broadband at home.

Today the digital divide affects mainly the poor, who can’t afford a computer and broadband. And what makes it even worse, is that there are [physical] community divides.

ME: How are you clients benefiting from what you offer?

Some people have gotten better jobs, and they’ve gotten promotions if they’ve already had jobs. This particular community has a lot of crime; a lot of people who were dealing drugs got a second start here. I have personally hired people from the community who had been prior incarcerated. Not all have had problems with the law, but many have.

I’m finding people in the 50’s are struggling, because they don’t’ know the programs—Microsoft Office, et all. And they are competing with high school graduates. This group is in a tough place, but with the 20 to 40 crowd, I’ve seen a lot of success.

A photo by Felton Cogell

A photo by Felton Cogell

WACTC Students Comment

Louvenia Williams says:

I’m 81. I was here when they built the building. I’ve been here 8 or 9 years, first learning general software, then Photoshop. I found that I loved it–that’s been my focus ever since. Some of [my] the old family photographs, I’ve tried restoring. Because they were in black and white, I’ve added color to a few of them.

Well, since I am retired, I feel like a family here. I look forward to coming to the center. We have our picnics, field trips…we celebrate birthdays.

It keeps my mind active to be involved. I walk to the center, so it’s good exercise. It benefits me in many ways.

James Smith says:

I’m 75 years old. I’ve been coming here since the first of the year. I found out about it through one of my lodge members. I need to learn about computers, and about taking pictures. Every time I go somewhere people ask me if I’ve brought pictures back. I never did, but now I’m trying to play catch-up to bring pictures back.

I’m meeting my expectations. I enjoy the camaraderie of all the people here. They’ve all been helpful. Sometimes the students tend to help with the instructors. It is beginning to be like a family. When someone is missing, you miss them. You get used to them being here.

I had been buying computers for my children. I didn’t want to get involved myself, but I reluctantly decided to switch over. I’m enjoying it too.

Doretha Albert says:

I’m 72. I’ve been coming here since 2002. I worked as a registered nurse for 36 years and at that time I had secretaries doing data input. Once I returned, I knew nothing about computers. I knew nothing about email…or nothing. One day I was at church and they announced they were opening a computer center, and I enrolled. I came and learned how to do emails. At the time we learned how to do copy and paste. We had different programs, like Publisher. We learned how to make mailing envelops, and how to do business cards. The class did a newsletter. This was in the first year.

“Allowing the creative process to uncover questions regarding my own true nature and my relationship to the world has become a freeing experience” is what Michael Welch says of his internal art-making methodology. Welch has been involved in visual art in one form or another since childhood and he see art as a vital instrument—since the time of antiquity—that happens intuitively, perhaps even unconsciously; in a way that benefits the whole of society in positive lasting change. It’s transformative, he believes.

In a recent SKYPE chat, Welch pondered his own body of work, the art world at large and humanity’s collective psychology. This dynamic he relates directly to the life of birds–a subject he’s been drawing inspiration from of late–saying that “While people spend their whole lives struggling to find security in an increasingly insecure world, birds seem to live carefree embracing the moment not worrying what the future will bring.

Michael Welch: Art as a Freeing Experience

Michael, I’d like to start by looking at what you state in the first sentence of your artist statement, when you talk about this: “Allowing the creative process to uncover questions regarding my own true nature and my relationship to the world has become a freeing experience. Through the recognition of my personal role as an artist, I have learned to trust in the varied and unpredictable ways my work manifests itself.” Could you explain further how the creative process frees up your relationship with the world?

I think that like anything else, if I look at my artwork, it has totally evolved over a period of time what’s a stating to happen for me, in the beginning it was hard for me to trust the process. I used to use a lot of other people images, yet the more ai allowed myself to become very honest in my own process, I was more and more able to just let go of these crutches/bridges. I find now that I just don’t need those bridges. There’s this force, this creative energy, and to sit in that when I was younger was quite painful there is this question that comes up: Am I really an artist?” What am I supposed to be doing here? What’s my next step, but I’m starting to trust that process, that ground of who I am. Art has been a target for me for that ground.

The beauty of digital art is that for me it’s done with pixels made for electronic media, yet now with all these great new printers, I can do these prints that are just gorgeous. I can send my work out on the internet and yet I can make all these digital prints. For me it’s a medium. I can sit in a coffee shop with a laptop and create and its finished work. I can store thousands of prints on my computer, and all I need to do is go to a printer and print out my work.

What were you doing before digital?

I was doing graphic design and illustration, using traditional illustration tools—pastels, pen and ink, scratch board, acrylic, etc.; also using the computer as a tool, Adobe Illustrator. When my daughter was born I didn’t have a lot of room, but I had a computer. So, I started messing around with the paint tool in Photoshop and really fell in love with it. Photoshop made it really cool, because I can mess around with colors, I can use curves. I can work in huge detail if I want too. I can blow a small thing up and use my whole computer screen, I could never do that when I was painting traditionally. I have more options.

“Mockingbird 2”

I notice you edition 20 or less of each print that you make. How did you arrive at that determination?

I think that, just to try to create value in certain pieces, if somebody was collecting they would know there were only 20 pieces. With electronic media, they would know that they were buying a piece of fine art; distinguishing something that is publicly owned and something that has value because of its limited nature.

I could see it 2 different ways. There’s a part of me that it just goes out, and there’s value in that…the public domain. Shepard Fairey is a perfect example of that. The other is that at the same time, it is fine art. There is value in the print itself, so it’s not any different than any type of print. You limit it and by doing that, it creates value. If people want to collect your work, you’re making this promise that…look, that’s it. Anything that has value, part of that value is its limited nature. Art has value, the value is intrinsic.

Elaborating on that, could you speak more to art’s role in society?

In the indigenous world, when things went bad in societies, art would come to the forefront. A lot of times artists don’t even know why we’re doing it. I think again, that’s finding a ground, our central nature that we share with someone else. A lot times artist create from that place, a we perspective. The dancers in a tribe, the shaman—when there was a sickness put together a dance to share the feeling that the tribe may have had. That came from the arts. It doesn’t exclude the intellect, but it’s not just an intellectual process.

Where does this stuff come from? That’s a great question that people can’t answer, and I think that it’s great that people can’t answer it. When people weren’t making money from art, a lot of important things were being said that were important for people to hear.

Commerce is fine, but greed…just the few people that have a lot of money have gained control over global politics. When times are trying–like they are now– that voice comes out stronger. That’s just one of the first places that these messages come from, in spite of commerce.

And could you talk about what you mean when you say: Although my skills have evolved since childhood, my communion with form and color has remained consistent and beyond explanation?

I’m just wondering as an artist if you can relate to this: I remember just the color of this green bench that my parents had in the backyard. Just being a toddler, I remember that. I remember these very tiny flowers that were orange, being immersed in the color. I have never gone beyond that sense of mystery.

How is digital different or the same as traditional art—painting?

For me, it’s just another tool. I don’t think it’s any different than when artists began to use photographs. I think artists know that. It’s just another medium, it’s just another tool. It has its own characteristics. I don’t think of digital art as being digital art, because for me it’s just a tool. I still paint; I still do a lot of work on panel. I still paint traditionally, because I appreciate both tools.

Michael, thanks for taking the time to speak with me.

These are excellent questions; just asking them kinda puts me in having to look at these things again. I feel very appreciative of the questions you’ve asked. You’ve made me think about these things again There’s a lot of appreciation.

In our latest AD MAG feature, contributing writer, Andrew Reach, conducts an oral history with digital art pioneer, Steve Sherrell. An artist and educator, Sherrell is one of the digital art world’s standout creatives, bringing to the fore a wealth of knowledge about the technology and the people involved, whose influence has shaped contemporary, new media and digital art. And tracing his artistic roots back through the contemporary, to pre-war Modernism, he holds a firm belief that core truths put in motion at the Bauhaus school nearly 100 years ago, are alive and well today, saying of digital art:

“When I started working with that first Amiga, I realized that if Kandinsky were alive at that moment, he would have been a computer artist…in today’s world the computer is used for all sorts of permutations of visual art, but in reality the computer uses binary numbers to do everything…inherently it is Bauhaus, if you think about it…aesthetically, that is still an interesting space”

AR: Give us a little background about yourself. Where were you raised and could you give us some insight to what led you to decide to devote your life to the arts?

SS: I was born in Muncie Indiana, at the midpoint of the 20th century. At this point in time there was very little contemporary art in the United States, and what art there was a contemporary nature was being done in New York City. My father was a window trimmer for an upscale department store located in the small town of Muncie. The store was owned by the Ball family who also owned the Ball Corporation that made canning jars. They also founded Ball State University, which is also in Muncie. At that time windows were very important to department stores because there was a much greater pedestrian presence in towns and my father was regularly sent to New York to look at display windows.

My father was an artist also, so while he was in New York he took time to see the latest trends in art. This helped him as an artist and also helped the company because his display work was up to date. It also introduced me to the notion of ‘cool’ before it had reached my town through the media.

I grew up without much pressure and I really didn’t get a lot of training as an artist when I was young. The art that my father was doing was very contemporary and all around me. I grew up with many books around the house about art but the local school system was rather backwater and didn’t really understand the type of art that I was looking at. I was looking at Modigliani and Picasso, Pollack and Pop when the other kids in my school were looking at, well honestly, not much of anything. You have to realize that out there in America in the 50s, even someone as traditional seeming as Reginald Marsh would be considered outrageously progressive. Someone like Jackson Pollock had not even been derided by Time magazine as “Jack the Dripper” yet.

Art was not common. I came to my seventh grade class with an abstract drawing and was told by my art teacher that “we don’t do those kind of things”

So from early on, I was a rebel. Art was not really important to me at that point so I concentrated on rampant curiosity and running wild, much to the chagrin of my parents. But in the late 60s my rebelliousness helped me, considering the cultural climate. In 1968, after I went to Woodstock, of course, I thought I’d take a drawing class at Ball State where I was enrolled at the time and while doing my second drawing I had an epiphany. I completely realized that I was an artist and that I would be the rest of my life.

Then it was just finding a place that fit. That place was the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I moved to Chicago in 1972 with my wife and my baby daughter and started attending classes in 1973. I finished my bachelor’s degree in 1977 in painting and drawing in my Masters degree in painting and drawing in 1978.

AR: Max Eternity, founder and publisher of Art Digital Magazine coined the acronym TADAE which stands for Traditional and Digital Artist Engineer. We see a shift where artists are embracing science and technology and expanding their arsenal of tools beyond the paint brush. You have a traditional artist background and have expanded from paintings and mixed media to digital photography and digital art. Could you fill in the blanks as to how this transformation happened?

SS: I remember talking with one of my teachers in the late 1960s about the potential for computers and the notion of design. At that point computers were only punch card systems that basically formed perfunctory math and business tasks. But my studies as an artist took precedence over my curiosity as a budding computer engineer and for 20 years I studied the art of painting and drawing while showing pretty extensively in the Chicago art scene.

I come from a background of hands-on designers who considered craftsmanship and old-school technical skills as a prerequisite to any kind of art. Things like being able to build something square or being able to join things together that look nice or being able to cut a line were of great importance. I spent a lot of time learning how to hand letter signs, for example. But I also spent a lot of time studying art history and looking at the physical way that art was made. I’ve always believed that art is a handmade entity ultimately, even digital art.

I was teaching painting and drawing in the late 1980s and the school had one Macintosh computer. I was fascinated with the computer although the fellow who controlled it was not very cooperative about me playing with it. It really didn’t matter because at that time I was trying to get a job in painting and drawing and it really didn’t seem to me that learning the computer was so important. In the early 1990s a very good friend of mine was studying printmaking at the University of Wisconsin. He had access to some very high-end computers and was very excited about the future of computers. We spent a day discussing the possibilities at the Art Institute of Chicago while walking around the collections. He convinced me that I should look into Amiga computers and I did. When my Dean told me that my future as a teacher would be greatly enhanced with computer experience, I started to get excited about the possibilities. I purchased an Amiga 1200 with a 60 meg hard drive and 1 MB of RAM and started working with Dpaint.

Amigas were amazing computers in those days. They had spent much time developing their graphic capabilities and independent developers had developed very good graphics programs. DPaint, for example, had features in it that rival and exceed certain paint programs that are available today. The pictures that were created with DPaint were incredibly small, and I could fit eight to 10 of them on a floppy disk . This allowed me a flexibility of doing work that could be sent to places for entry into competitions for very little money and very little headache. This was long before the Internet was as versatile as it is today and long before the transferring of files was as easy as it is today. Scanner technology was expensive and touchy so I just made art completely with the computer without many filters or tricks. My work then was 640 X 480 interlaced.

So I started as a computer artist at a time when it was almost like being a child playing with a new toy. Considering the type of curiosity and creativity that I have, this was a good fit for me. Plus Amigas were almost impossible to destroy and were WYSIWYG, so I could play around with the computer and learn the way that computers worked without having to worry about hurting things or learning [Arggg] code. Shortly thereafter my Dean found out that I had been in some shows in Europe of computer art and asked me to teach graphic design. They gave me some money to buy a Mac and I learned how to use Photoshop, Illustrator and Pagemaker.

I became versed in Apple Computers and then learned how to use PCs. I started with Photoshop 3 and a couple other programs and have worked ever since with a variety of different kinds of computers and software.

I developed one of the first computer art courses in the state of Illinois in the late 90s that I have taught ever since. I’ve been making art on the computer for 20 years. I’m interested in all the possibilities of how you use a computer to make art, including printing, transfer methods, and just painting and drawing the output of the computer onto large format old-school art materials.

“By This River “

AR: Your work is of many varied themes, informed by many sources, especially art history, taking cues and making references to such varied sources as the Romanticism of a J.M. Turner Landscape, to the plasticity of Kandinksy to the dreamy transformations of the surrealists to name just a few. Could you expand on how you take so many disparate ingredients, mixed them all up in a big cauldron and create a wholly original Steve Sherrell?

SS: Originality is interesting question for an artist. I’ve been looking and thinking about art my whole life and have lived through a time when the nature of art has evolved in very many ways. For example I saw Robert Motherwell speak in the early 70s during the inception of of body art, Pop and Op, Performance and Fluxus and the dawning of conceptual art. Motherwell said at the time that objectivism had been solved by Bauhaus, the abstract expressionists had finished off subjectivism and the rest was Marcel Duchamp. Considering that Motherwell was the person who brought the DADA papers into the New York art scene after they had been rescued from Germany I thought his observations were particularly insightful. He said that the new artist would find a way to reconcile all these different ideas.

Coincidentally at this time I was studying with a New York artist named Jonathan Borofsky who was a conceptual artist that was starting to branch away from pure conceptualism and moving toward a sort of open approach to art making, where everything was allowed to happen freely. I was working on a large painting that was eventually shown in a large show at the Art Institute. He told me that the painting was great but he said there is much more to art than just creating things that the public would respond to. He told me that an artist should never hold back anything; that the new role of the artist was to be observer and creator without concerns for past work or current styles. So I started down the path of just doing whatever I felt like I should do regardless of the consequences.

At that time the gallery system demanded a signature style, so what I tried to do was work in groups or series so that if someone was interested in a certain type of work that I was doing I could pull together a show without much trouble. I adopted this idea 40 years ago and it has served me well ever since. This is now considered a postmodern stance but whatever the label, I have been doing it for a long time.

As for your observation about art history, that is interesting. Many people today consider saying something looks like art or art history as a derogatory statement. But then when you look at their work most of the time it is stuff that I’ve seen many times in the past in an art context. For example one of my students has been gold leafing tools. Clive Barker did that in the 60s, Jeff Koons did it in the 80s, so originality is a treacherous subject. I mentioned before that Motherwell said everything else was Duchamp. It seems to me that the reality of the situation is that there are certain artists you can be influenced by and certain artists you can’t be influenced by without wandering into the situation where people will say that you’re not original.

Honestly I don’t care if you see some Kandinsky in my work, how could an abstract artist not have Kandinsky in their work? I’m not ignorant of art history and I love it and my memory banks are full of it and I don’t care about influences, so for me it’s a joy. If I could be a quarter as good as Picasso or Turner or Philip Guston or Gerhard Richter my life would be complete.

“Macgoofhaus”

AR: On your website you have seven different categories of digital work. One of the categories is a series of beautiful fantastical portraits titled Cosmolina. For me they are reminiscent of Ed Paschke’s portraits, whose work first made me aware of the Chicago art movement of the Imagists. They are beautifully crafted with highly worked and densely populated symmetrical overlays of texture, fauna and pattern. What are these works about? Do they have a connection to the influence of the Chicago Imagists?

SS: I’m glad you caught that. My mentors were Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead. Ray was also the teacher of Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg and many of the rest of the second-generation imagist artists who went by the moniker “Harry Who”. Ed Paschke did not study with Ray, in fact when I was in school he was teaching at Northwestern University. At that time I worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and those guys were around all the time. I knew some of them well and knew some of them slightly but I knew their work and couldn’t help being influenced by it. I used to hang around with Roger Brown’s brother, Greg. We were in a cooperative gallery together called West Hubbard Gallery that was part of the cooperative scene in the late 70s on Hubbard Street in Chicago. (I am currently with a co-op called 33 Collective in Bridgeport in Chicago at the Zhou B Center)

Chicago is a very large art scene and runs on its own rules. It’s also a tough art scene and many of the artists that leave the Chicago art scene for other places do really well. Chicago teaches them how to be tough and competitive and unafraid to be yourself. Jeff Koons also came from the scene. In fact we had Studios next door to each other in undergraduate school and were friends. He became friends with Ed Paschke and studied with him before going on to New York and to fame and fortune. Unfortunately pursuing the traditional imagist path became a losing proposition by the 80s. A friend of mine was in a three-person show with Roger Brown and Ed Paschke, but by that time imagism was fading and my friend did not achieve the fame of either of the two.

Cosmolina developed from a couple different ideas. One of the ideas is one that has been bantered around and involves itself with the nature of perfect human beauty. The other idea has to do with the notion of individual persona versus combining various aspects of different persona into a face. The girl that is in most of the pictures is named Candace Anderson and was a model that I used for my life drawing class for a few years. As you can see she is a very beautiful girl and I took some photographs of her face just to see what I could do with them. First off I divided her face down the center and made two faces, one with each side of her face repeated and reversed. These were two different faces completely although belonging to the same person. Since they say that beauty is symmetrical this seemed logical to me and it also gave me two different models that I could work from. I then became interested in overlays and how symmetrical overlays could be used in conjunction with the notion of beauty and particularly the notion of beauty in a human face. For many years I’ve been doing open-ended computer pieces that were never meant to be finished pieces in themselves but could serve as backgrounds, drop-ins and all sorts of other things when I needed something like that to embellish a piece. So I started dropping things over the top of the face and realized that it led to all different kinds of possibilities. The face could be extremely removed from a piece and still be there and that beauty could find its way through huge amounts of layers and still shine from below. So in a funny way these were imagist and in a funny way they weren’t because imagists were never concerned with beauty, except maybe the beauty of the surface of the painting. But by studying beauty one also can understand ugliness and understand the point where something that’s beautiful can carry with it many things that one would not traditionally associated with beauty.

Cosmolina also became the female Archetype. She became a sort of emblem of my love of people and their persona and my intrigue with the human face. She also served as a sort of muse; one that is related to the “V” of Thomas Pynchon’s novel of the same name. Her beauty is ideal but also mechanized, a facsimile of a face or a robot face. Maybe the face of the computer muse.

So perhaps she became the muse for my love of the computer and it’s capabilities of creating worlds so complex and rich, so divergent and complete that some are drawn to completely immerse themselves in that reality while forgetting their place in the real reality. Maybe Cosmolina is a metaphor for that thing that the computer draws us to look for in its hidden places, that thing we are all looking for and find hints of in everything we do.

I still, even after using the computer for 20 years, am finding new and unique ways to use the computer’s possibilities. It has both expanded my capabilities technologically and traditionally, with old school materials. It has made me a much better painter, made me much more productive, given me ways of both visualizing and creating very original art, while giving me outlets and promotional tools undreamed of as a child. It is a perfect art machine and a great medium.

AR: Being an Architect as well as an artist, an aspect that speaks to me personally in many of the works is a constructivist and architectural quality they have. Pieces like “MacGoofhaus”, “Structuro” and “Tower” are constructivist compositions of architectonic shapes and colors all seeming to defy gravity. Coined Goofypics, they are playful and inventive. You talked earlier that you learned early on the importance of craftsmanship and technical skills; being able to build something and make it square, cutting a straight line and that comes through in these works. Could you elaborate more on the architectural connection and the idea of craftsmanship and how it plays into new digital paradigms?

SS: It’s interesting that you ask me this question. Lately I’ve been looking at the art of Lazlo Maholy Nagy, a constructivist and teacher at the Bauhaus. My computer art grew out of my painting, and my painting ideas formulated my early experimentation with the computer as an art making tool. As a painter I never broke away from the notion of the rectangle as picture plane. I do not believe painting is dead. I was never really drawn to conceptual art and I’ve never been really drawn to deconstruction so constructivism is a logical place for me to be. Architecture is constructive by nature. I suppose there is deconstructive architecture but I think of deconstructed architecture as rubble. I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of the varieties of the way that one can create space in a rectangle. And when I say create space I mean both 2-D and 3-D space as it’s perceived in a painted environment. In other words I start with the rectangle and I start to compose a spatial construction within it. I was doing that before I started working with the computer and it was a logical step considering the constraints that early computer art tools had.

Almost immediately, when I started working with that first Amiga, I realized that if Kandinsky were alive at that moment, he would have been a computer artist. In a sort of logical way the computer is an objective machine. In today’s world the computer is used for all sorts of permutations of visual art, but in reality the computer uses binary numbers to do everything. Inherently it is Bauhaus, if you think about it. Bauhaus was Architecture. So it is a hop-skip-jump from digital space to massive real world objects like buildings. They say we live in a media world, but I live in a world of architecture mixed with nature. Aesthetically, that is still an interesting space.

I also have a romantic side that manifests itself in other things that I do, so the other functions that a computer provides also interest me, but honestly as time goes by I’m more and more fascinated by the intellectual process that I used when I did my first computer paintings and become less and less interested in using scans and pre-existing imagery. Except for photography, which I see now as purely digital phenomena, I love to think of the computer as an art making device.

“Structuro”

AR: I’d like to probe a little bit into your teaching. You pioneered in computer art education with the computer art curriculum you developed in the 90s. What are the principles of your curriculum and could you tell us about your personal experience of teaching computer art?

SS: I teach at a junior college and we have a nice art department, but we have a great many students who come in from other disciplines to take our classes. We have strong set of art students but we also have many students who are interested in graphic design, web design and other areas of the applied arts. Some of the students who take my computer art courses are artistic in the traditional sense but some of the new type of students in the computer arts don’t take traditional art classes at all, but are very involved with Deviant-Art, graffiti and illustration. Many students feel intimidated by working on paper or canvas but don’t feel the same sorts of fears when working with the computer. In fact for many of the students it becomes an outlet for their creativity that art never provided them.

My curriculum starts out with three lessons that teach basic skills with the computer. The first is a painting and drawing assignment where I don’t allow the students to use any scanned images. The second assignment has to do with cutting and pasting so that they can learn techniques in Photoshop. The third lesson involves image composting and the fourth introduces a theme (nostalgia). Each of those lessons requires that they do three pictures, 8 x 10 inches at 300 dpi. After that they are just required to do a set number of pictures.

I’ve always believed that each artist is an individual and things that move an artist are the artist’s choice. But I also believe that young people are not very sophisticated when it comes to the arts and so I encourage them to look at computer art. However, in the classroom I talk about contemporary art and I show how contemporary art connects to what you can do with the computer. For example, next class I’m going to talk about Dada and show them the work of Francis Picabia, who pioneered the idea of image composting. My goal is to try to help them learn to make high-quality artwork while still operating in the world of digital images.

AR: Looking at your newest work in your “20 Newest Pieces” gallery page, in addition to your digital work you’re working in a wide range of media. There are acrylics on canvas, acrylics with collage, watercolor on paper, mixed on board and crayon on board. Do you work concurrently on different pieces, switching back and forth between digital and traditional? Do different ideas that you want to express intuitively want to be in one medium or another? It would be interesting to hear how that process works.

SS: I have an exhibit opening at 33 Collective Gallery in Chicago in November that I’m thinking of titling “Unstable, new work by Steve Sherrell” Another title I was considering is “All over the Place” LOL. I am not an artist with a signature style.

My answer to your question is: Whatever I feel like doing, I do. I do not confine myself to one thing, one medium or one type of art. I generally call myself a painter and digital artist. Right now I am working on two encaustic pieces done with crayon, a large acrylic painting (5 feet by 8 feet) and I am pricing out 2 large computer prints for my exhibit.

I am really interested in crossing back and forth between the possibilities of bringing digital things into the real world via traditional means. For example, I have been using transfer processes to place hand worked digital photography onto painted substrates. The process hides the fact that it was glued onto the surface so it has a kind of Trompe l’oile quality. Maybe like Trompe l’photograph… People cannot figure out what they are looking at.

I work fluently in oil, acrylic, encaustic, watercolor, tempera, collage, bricolage and various digital means. I am really less interested in printed digital giclee than I am in various left handed methods to bring stuff out of the box. So when I say I am going to have things printed, I may end up printing the large pieces with a color laser and work them onto a treated surface. I will decide when I get the itch.

AR: Again looking at the “20 Newest Pieces” gallery, I’m focusing on the digital work. Some of works are so painterly like “Heart” and “Pod”. They are as fluid and organic as any painting, drawing or watercolor could be. And then, compare these to another series of works like “Jewel” and “Somewhat near bliss” which feels purely ‘digital’. This diversity of technique, I think shows your versatility of the medium and reinforces your championing of craftsmanship. The painterly works are looser and freer than your earlier works. Could you tell us more about them?

SS: I remember when I first started working and printing with the computer. I had an early Hewlett-Packard printer. The drivers that were included on the Amiga were not very good so everything pretty much had to be set up by hand, including color matching. I had to do about 200 prints and keep the logs of what the settings were so that I could print to match the colors on the screen.

I say this because in my early days working digitally everything I was doing I was making up. It was sort of like being a child with a really complicated toy. The first Amiga was a very computery computer. It didn’t really cross into other worlds very well. The highest resolution was 640×480 so detail wasn’t very easy to achieve. When I started working with my first Macs and started scanning imagery I began to see the potential of detail and sensitivity that the computer had. Today that detail and sensitivity is obvious and completely manifest in video games and films. So as I started to see the sensitivity coming into the medium I decided that I would try to emulate various real-world situations (at least my real world) and started to try to use the computer to emulate painting, drawing and true collage.

It is not a complicated process to make a digital piece look like painting. The difficulty lies in understanding the difference between what a painting and a digital piece of work looks like. Another way of saying this is: paintings have their own logic and computer work has its own logic. What you have to do is try to bend the computer’s logic towards painting logic and then the bend painting logic towards computer logic. That seems complicated, I know, but it is a subtle but very important difference between the two mediums.

I was talking with a student who has been a photographer for a very long time. He took my class to learn to make versions of his portraits that look like paintings. He understands photography but does not know painting so he is a little frustrated because as he says “Painting on the computer is really just smearing stuff” I will have to figure out a way for him to see the difference. Perhaps I will take him down to the painting room.

“Jewel”

AR: The new works “Jewel” and “Somewhat near bliss” that I mentioned before, I characterized as purely digital because you comment on your ACM Siggraph page about them:

“I am attempting to use the computer as a pure medium with no tricks except the ones that are natural to the medium.”

These beautiful works feel like atomic waves and particles in flux as if energized by some hidden energy source. Could you tell us a little about these works and expand on your statement about computers as a pure medium?

SS: I was thinking when I completed “Somewhat near bliss” that bliss is a pure state, one that has to go clear down to the molecular level. All things in the universe are both possible and improbable. We come near to that perfection, but never really achieve it unless we are very, very lucky. I’ve been reading Deepok Chopra lately and have been contemplating the idea of source versus manifestation. It seems that source can be pure, because it does not need to really exist. It can just stay an idea, a possibility.

When you cook a very complicated dish, a curry or a pie, you leave behind a good amount of waste and clutter. You need to clean up afterwards. Then you eat the food and it always falls a little short of your hopes of what it could have been. Then it is gone, just a memory. When it was just a thought, an idea, it was perfect.

Painting is like that; dirty and complicated, falling a little short. It always disappoints on some level. It can send you on an inspiration high to the moon, but Mars still floats out there, waiting for the next attempt.

Inside the computer, there is a form of purity. It is an electrical, digital purity. It never spills out onto the floor. It does not contain grit or dirt. That world is different from our world. It is somewhat like the molecular level of bliss. But unlike bliss, which we can only imagine in our mind, the world inside the computer is visible. We can see it with our eyes, but it is only a flickering image. We can look, just to get a little peek, but then we move on and go about the business of reordering those things we can fix and living with the disappointment of those we have no control over. We can get “Somewhat near” bliss, but even the pure place of the digital, can never achieve it fully.

The thing that intrigues me the most is that the computer is really out of this world. The minute that you bring a real, scanned or photographed image in, you sort of corrupt something that is pure. Not to say that doing so is bad, just that a change occurs.

I have had about 25 real world exhibits in the last two years. I have been so busy making things to show that I haven’t been able to spend much time working on the digital stuff. I look forward to this winter, when everything is hibernating, to go deeply into the computer and make new things.

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Additional artwork can be found in the AD MAG Artist Galleries, and a full 3-year archive of AD MAG articles can be found here. Visit Steve Sherrell’s website here. Visit Andrew Reach’s website here.

Having exhibited his artwork in more than 350 shows internationally, Kenneth Huff is one of the world’s most renowned digital creatives–redefining the word fabulous. With an amassed portfolio of naturalistic permutations in prints, sculptures and time-based works, Huff explores organic forms found in the natural world—the ever present beauty in everyday surroundings. Of his sumptuous signature style, he says “Organic structures harkens back to the main point of my work–patterns in nature. Why I create is not about the technology, it’s about the image.”

Huff operates a website called Organik, and a blog named It Goes Boing. There, he documents a chronology of works created, also sharing insight into his process. Reflecting on the intent of creative motivations, on the site he writes “From the first time a finger traces along the spiral of a seashell, our lives are permeated with the joy of discovery. Forms, patterns and experiences are stored in our memories and become part of the fundamental cognitive framework through which we identify and classify the world.”

He shared with me his love for language and words, and his visionary aspiration for creative possibilities in the not-to-distant future.

“2005.1”

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Kenneth Huff

Natural | Digital

By Max Eternity

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Max Eternity (ME): More than a decade ago I became aware of the naturalistic aspects of the digital realm, but some find this a difficult concept to grasp?

Kenneth Huff (KH): I don’t. The way I’ve always approached my work, it’s inspired by nature. The medium is in service and to the intent of my work. It’s never been an issue with my work.

ME: Your website is called Organik, spelled with a “k” on the end. Why the name and the spelling, and what’s the significance of incorporating organic structures in your work?

KH: the name was just a play on words. I love language and words, and I was just being clever. Organic structures harkens back to the main point of my work–patterns in nature. Why I create is not about the technology, it’s about the image. I just happen to use technology. If 3-d wasn’t available, I’d be working in clay or glass to format the patterns. I don’t’ know if time based would be possible, that’s different from any sort of traditional mediums.

ME: Must art be beautiful? Which of course, begs the question, how do you define beauty?

KH: Obviously, it doesn’t need to be beautiful. Beauty is one of those things that is defined by the viewer. I find I’m inspired by things I find beautiful. It’s something that the individual artist has to define themselves.

It’s not the way art is defined–it’s the perspective of the creator. And ss far as the viewer is concerned, it’s something they have to decide.

At shows, I’ve seen how people react to my work. It’s fascinating to me. I’m creating the work for myself, and I share the work. I don’t get caught up in broad sweeping segments about what art is. I’m creating it. I call myself an artist. It’s been liberating to me.

“2007.5” Installation in Salinas, Kansas. 2010

ME: Tell me about your current installation in Salinas, Kansas.

KH: it’s the installation happened earlier this summer. The Arts and Humanities Committee there asked me to come in and do some site-specific installations in the downtown area. The National Endowment for the Arts funded the project. I was there for about a week, visited a bunch of sites and settled on two; one above a coffee shop, and the other in the museum where the Arts and Humanities commission offices were. I prepared the window surfaces for the time based pieces of the site. The museum piece is much larger image, separated for four projections. It’s one thing to see my work on the computer screen, but it’s always important to me to see these things in context; to see it on site.

ME: In your role as a professor @ SCAD, beyond their college credits, what wisdom do you seek to impart to your students?

KH: The program that I teach is a visual effects program, oriented toward industry–film animation. I want students to see that these tools they are using, to be used also for non-commercial purposes; to satisfy their own creative urges, not always in service to someone else’s intent. I hope they get that from it. I hope too that they always remember that whatever the medium, it should always be in service to artistic intent. The medium shouldn’t stand in the way of the message or intent that they are trying to implement.

ME: What means art today, is it the same as it ever was, or has something fundamentally changed because of digital technology?

KH: Artist have always used whatever was available to them, and at times they probably wouldn’t consider it as art—when art was more integrated in day to day experiences. I don’t think anything has changed. Artists are simply using what technology is available to them. This has been going on for thousands of years. What ever is available, artists will find a way to use it creatively. There’s no fundamental difference.

One thing I think is terrific though, is that with the new technology, artists are able to communicate their work to a much broader audience. That to me is probably the biggest change. But artists in general…artists take advantage of what’s available to them.

ME: What is something that people should know about you that they might see in your work, but not understand? In other words, how do you describe what you do, and how does that tie into you—the personality?

KH: The biggest thing that I think that might be–the subtle thing—is that I’m driven by my curiosity of the world. And often times the pieces I create, almost always, are directly inspired by things I’ve seen or experience in the physical world. It’s not always an obvious connection. I do try to keep the work fairly ambiguous.

My work–it’s a combination of experience. But it’s not arbitrary; they do have a basis in my curiosity, my desire to discover new things.

ME: Can you take a moment and talk about your creative process?

KH: Typically, it starts from sketches, almost always–written about, beforehand. I go through a pretty long development process ahead of time, doing technical experiments; determining if the tools I have available will work, or if I’ll have to develop my own tools. With time based work, it takes anywhere from a month to 6 months. I try to get to the rough outlines quickly, to prove that it’s going to work. Then I start to define it, that process is very incremental; until it matches up with the initial idea that I had. Sometimes I shelve an idea until technology catches up, or until my skills catch up. If they are strong enough, I’ll go back to those ideas and implement them at a later date.

ME: What does the future hold for art and technology, well as far as you can say? What’s your vision?

KH: I’ve been working a lot recently on time-based work. So, let me put it in terms in what I would like to see happen there. I would like technology to come to the point where an entire place, a surrounding, where say, a massive wall could be used as a changeable display; not needing external projection, without obvious technology—seamlessly. I can see that happening within the next ten years, where images can be more incorporated in day to day experiences. Of course, this might create more art and more noise. Artist show that any technology can be used to create something meaningful or to create noise. I would like to see more and more sophisticated technologies that aid in incorporating art seamlessly.

ME: Is there something I haven’t asked about that you’d like to share?

KH: I’ve been spending most of the summer creating new time based works. Now I’m starting to show the pieces on Vimeo, so that people can get a better sense of the time based work, without being there in person. That’s the next thing, rolling out more of my work on Vimeo, it’s a universal platform.

Is Your Museum Too White?

by Max Eternity

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For some years now, behind the scenes and in galleries and museums, artists and curators have been discussing the transformative effects electronic and digital technologies are having in the arts. As a curatorial adviser on digital art – the founder of Art Digital Magazine, which has the largest online archive in the world of feature-length interviews with new media artists, writers and educators – I’ve participated in quite a few of these debates.

With some expected delay, works of art made with digital tools are becoming more accepted in the mainstream, as the intersection between the arts and sciences becomes intractably intertwined. This has led some to wonder: Is the word “artist” becoming outdated? We now have nomenclature for new mediums and genres, so what about the people creating those works? Who’s a “technologist” versus who’s an “artist”? Or does it make better sense to just call a person on the cutting-edge of art and technology, a “creative”? In addition, there is a growing need to understand and incorporate new social constructs, such that the institutions of art and culture can reach their audiences and, thus, remain relevant.

Just like the industrial revolution, which started out as a technological leap forward in agriculture and manufacturing 200 years ago and 100 years later entered a second wave that ended up being a catalyst for great change all around – literally transforming interactions between race and class – the digital revolution is not just about online entertainment, easy chat and techno-gadgets. No, its causation reverberates much deeper than that.

Here’s a quick for instance. Through mass production, as Europe moved from Gutenberg’s hand press, invented in 1440, to the 19th Century, printing went from a luxury to something ubiquitous and quite affordable. This in turn saw the rise of public libraries and literacy rates went up dramatically. It may seem hard to believe now, but once upon a time, books were essentially to be found only in well-funded religious institutions and in the homes of the rich. There was no such thing as the local community college, the public library or the neighborhood Barnes & Noble. And as far as fine art printing went – as in, lithographs of artists’ works – until the industrial age, there was no such thing as editioning off 300 prints for prospective clients.

Today, commerce and culture are happening in a virtual realm, resulting in real, quantifiable, socio-economic change. And while oil paintings and industrial age print types continue to dominate in galleries and museums, art facilitated by digital tools is popping up everywhere.

As humankind takes another leap forward, whether or not it likes it, this past century’s art hierarchy will not escape certain changes in what they show and to whom and how they show. And who better to talk to about these new shifts than Nina Simon, editor of the blogazine Museum 2.0. She’s a successful, well-educated white woman, who says, quite frankly, “museums are too white.”

Nina Simon (Image credit: Nina Simon)

Max Eternity: On your web site, it says Museum 2.0 explores ways that web 2.0 philosophies can be applied in museum design. Could you give a explanation of what that means?

Nina Simon: There are so many examples of expectations around authority on who produces cultural content. I’m interested in how that impacts what happens in traditional cultural intuitions.

Tim O’Reilly defines Web 2.0 as software that gets better the more people use it. I’m interested in that question. How does a museum get better as people walk through the door, not worrying about how someone is dressed or if they will break something, instead seeing people as individuals who can share their expertise and stories to improve everybody’s experience?

ME: So, in addition to what they show, the question must also be asked: who are they showing to and how?

NS: Right and how is a visitor not just a consumer but a participant with that concept.

NS: I think it’s not specific to museums, a lot of non-profits work this way. A for-profit is made to make a lot of money – to fill your place and make money. There is an understanding that many of those business are going to fail. When you create a museum and you are going to protect these artifacts, or feed the hungry or whatever it is, there’s an expectation that you’re going to be around for a while to provide that program or service. So non-profits are fundamentally not built to achieve a business objective, they are built to provide services, which leads to a mentality of self preservation, not innovation.

ME: So how should museums go about choosing to survive or be “awesome,” as you say? Can they do both?

NS: Well yes, they definitely can. However, survival can’t be your first goal. There are some that need to focus on being awesome, but some not. For instance, if you have the Venus de Milo, that is a conservation ethic and goal about being safe. However, if you are the Bloomington Art Center or the Arizona Science Center, why not try to do whatever you can to really fulfill you mission in a way that’s gong to be exciting? You have to make choices in what you do. It’s about taking some risks.

A lot of work I do with museums is to help them get comfortable taking some risks. I create experiences that allow museums new ways to connect with audiences.

ME: Another article you wrote this year, asks: “What Does it Really Mean to Serve ‘Underserved’ Audiences?” In the piece you state, “Most large American museums are reflections of white culture.” They are “comfortable for whites, while feeling alien for people who don’t grow up in a white culture.” That’s a bold statement to make and being that you are white, that makes it even more surprising. Explain further, if you will.

NS: Well, I can’t speak for all museums. I have been in many museums where that’s not the case. But, I think it’s certainly known historically that most American museums were created in collaboration with some white person who had a collection or created an endowment, which caused that museum to be. So, this has resulted in museums having had goals about educating the lower class and the masses. Maybe white culture isn’t the best to describe it, but a particularly type of upper class or culture, that may or may not be white.

This article was particularly about the science center that I talked about in the piece and in this case the teens were predominately black. But it’s more than just about race. Museums are a reflection of a particular kind of elitism that tends to be white. The majority of visitors are white and there is a real need in museums is to find out how they can invite non-whites to come in. It’s about saying: Hey we’re here for you too.

Who feels comfortable here – what are we subconsciously saying the right and wrong ways to experience this place are and who feels comfortable with those different ways?

When you really talk to people about “why don’t you come,” the answers are complex but it’s always about who feels comfortable inside versus who’s being shut out.

ME: I think, too, it probably has to do with the broader ramifications of new technology, but what else specifically would you say is at the root of recent cultural and living anthropological shifts?

NS: Anthropologically, I think that in history and anthropology museums there has been a rise in the value of viewpoints on particular events – on the use of oral history to captures a story. There’s not just one story, there are many stories here. So, how can we invite many voices to be a part of this story – this object?

NS: There are a lot of arguments about loosening up authority, opening up the co-creation of the content inside. I feel great about that. Running the blog for the last year, I had a pulse on the concerns. What’s the story – what’s the utility of this?

Then people were asking about the how, with their boards asking: What should we do? How can we get comfortable with this? So, I wrote the book not just to argue why, but to give people tools and resources around how; case studies and design techniques around particular aspects in participations.

Let’s look at what’s possible to do. Explaining how with examples of how, is what I felt was really needed to get people to the next level.

ME: So, Nina, with all that you’ve said, how would you summate this dilemma, while also speaking to a new modality for building and sustaining a successful museum?

NS: Again and again, I’ve found that the only way to make museums comfortable, exciting places for diverse audiences is to spend time with people who are not like you; to listen and understand what they like, what they need, what they respond to. We all have internalized biases about how we want people around us to behave and I frequently see those biases butt up against aspirational statements about diversity. A museum will say they want to attract teens but then the guards growl at kids who travel in packs or are too loud. A museum will say it wants to attract working people but it closes every night at 5. This is why I love working with people who are not traditional museum visitors. I learn so much from them; things that are hard for me to see as an insider.

There is a museum culture and it does affect who does and doesn’t feel comfortable visiting the institution. If we ever want to really make these institutions as accessible, open and diverse as possible, we have to confront the biases inherent in the culture, and question them.

Value the people over the traditions. Show some respect and love for someone who is different from you.

As wave after wave of new technological innovations continue to wash over the world, I’ve become aware of both the intended consequences of access to digital tools, as well as those ramifications which might come as a surprise. Earlier this year I wrote an article entitled “Electronic Apartheid” which spoke to some of these unintended consequences, where in the piece I quoted one of the world’s most venerated elders, Nelson Mandela as saying “In the twenty-first century, the capacity to communicate will almost certainly be a key human right. Eliminating the distinction between the information-rich and information-poor is also critical to eliminating economic and other inequalities between North and South, and to improve the life of all humanity.”

Someone else who’s hip to all this, and dedicated to do something about it, is Jepchumba, the founder of African Digital Art—an online collective of digital artists and enthusiasts. And last month, while the World Cup was in full swing in South Africa, Jepchumba and I had a roving email exchange as she made the rounds in her native land.

She’s a spunky young Kenyan living in Chicago, creating digital art and inspiring others to do the same. And here’s what she had to say.

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African Digital Art: Jepchumba’s Vision

by Max Eternity

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“Young man”

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Max Eternity (ME): Jepchumba, hello and welcome to the interview.

Jepchumba (J): Thanks for having me. Thanks for the interview.

ME: You are the founder of African Digital Art. Talk about that–how did it come about?

J: Yes I am the founder of African Digital Art, but I am first and foremost an African digital artist. African Digital Art was created for people like me who are interested in pursuing a career or passion for anything that has to do with creativity and technology. African Digital Art came out of a need for more visibility of Africa’s talent in the digital media industry.

While I was pursuing my master’s in Digital Media from London Metropolitan University in the UK, I was flabbergasted by the lack of knowledge and awareness of the digital media arena in Africa. Due to the lack of resources and access to ICT and a host of other issues in Africa it seemed as though we were once again underestimated, almost counted out. So African Digital Art really came about to trumpet the incredible talent and creativity that was flowing through the continent. Even though we still have a long way to go as far as the challenges that Africa has in terms of technology and development, we still have a lot to offer. Africa has a long rich and cultural tradition in the visual arts, so it was only natural for it to move into the digital arena.

ME: You’ve got all these different skills, creating web design, digital paintings, animation and film. That’s a lot going on–how do you manage?

J: Ha. That is a great question. During my studies for my Masters in Digital Media I wanted to have a comprehensive education around the whole industry. I was really interested in the project management aspect of producing digital projects but I was determined to also have the skill behind it. Let’s just say I spent many hours online reading and mulling over tutorials trying to get my hands on anything that I could, like I mention on my website: I DREAM IN DIGITAL

ME: I was just looking at your “Be Water” video. I love the color and graphics. It’s a great message too. What inspired that video–why did you create it?

J: The “Be Water” video was a little project I did to learn Kinetic Typography. I have been fascinated with typography and graphic elements, and at the time I was doing my best to get exposed in using motion with graphic design.

ME: There are a couple of images in black and white that you created that caught my attention. Tell me about “Rainman” and “Sky Jedi.”

J: Wow! “Rainman” and “Sky Jedi” were really born out of a course I took at Mount Holyoke College, where I did my undergraduate studies. I took a course on Black Masculinity that really transformed the way I understood gender issues. Mount Holyoke College is an all women’s college; actually the first women’s college in the United States, and I had spent an extensive amount of time studying the place of thought in issues such as gender, sexuality, equality, individuality and political expression. I felt as though I had spent so much time understanding feminist issues that I needed to dedicate some time in understanding the masculine side. Those pieces were really inspired by a book I read in that masculinity class called Native Son by Richard Wright, the controversial view of the plight and struggle of the African American man.

“Sky Jedi”

“Rainman”

ME: How do you see digital technology changing life in Africa? Is it having a noticeable effect?

J: Digital Technology is transforming the way the world looks at Africa. Due to increased access in technology many Africans today have the opportunity to really speak for themselves. For a long, long time, the world has seen a very narrow view of Africa; a continent that is plagued by hunger, disease, strife and suffering. Those narrow lenses are now widened with accesses to technology. More and more Africans are gaining accesses to devices that allow them to practice their ingenuity.

There are tech companies such as Ushahidi, Appfrica and Frontline SMS that are changing the way the world experiences technology. Africans are using their mobile devices to surf the web, communicate with their family and the globe, and also generate income. Africans are using their computer to design their cities, their homes and express themselves. If you want to see a noticeable effect start by looking at africandigitalart.com you can see a slice of what I am taking about right then and there.

ME: Is African Digital Art engaged in the World Cup in any way, like selling art posters observing the World Cup taking place right now on the African continent?

J: African Digital Art network isn’t actually selling posters but you are completely right that there is an opportunity to blend visual arts with commercial opportunity. This is the next phase that ADA is embarking on. One thing that I believe strongly is that creativity has the potential to drive and influence an economy.

ME: Is there something else of interest that we need to be aware of.

J: I am currently traveling through Africa speaking with designers, architects, advertisers, students, professors and enthusiasts who are in the digital media industry on the best way to push forward and encourage economic success in the region. Countries such as South Africa, Kenya and Egypt are already reaping huge benefits by having professionally trained artists in the digital media industry who are taking in massive animation, film, web design projects. Africa has the potential to lead in the design industry and we can continue to influence how the world experiences and understands art and design like we have for centuries.

ME: Jepchumba, thanks for taking the time to speak with me.

J: I am completely honored. Thank you for taking the time to spend these past few weeks over this interview. I have been traveling throughout the continent and at times communication wasn’t the best on my part. Thank you so much for taking an interest in the work that I do as well as the African Digital Art Network.

“Boy”

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To learn more about Jepchumba and African Digital Art, click here. A full 3-year archive of AD MAG articles and interviews can be found here

Creating Common Cround

A conversation with Larry Richard

by Max Eternity

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Larry Richard in 2008 at the Common Ground exhibition in Beijing

Blending philanthropy with the visual arts and environmental concerns, Larry Richard has a long-standing career in bringing interested parties together through his own style of innovative marketing strategies. A humanist, naturalist and entrepreneur, Richard is the founder of Common Ground, a non-profit organization whose motto is “Merging art and Digital Media for a Healthy Planet.”

Richard says the organization helps artists and the environment in three ways: raising visibility and awareness in the media, selling books and prints then donating part of those funds to other environmental groups, with the third way being what he calls “leveraging corporate social responsibility”

First envisioned in 2004 and formally organized in 2007, Richard launched the Common Ground International Touring Exhibition in 2008. That exhibition and presentation was first shown in Beijing, coinciding with the Summer Olympics held there that same year.

Selected from a pool of over 1000 international artists, 40 artists were been chosen to participate in the show, which makes its way to Los Angeles next month–opening at the A & I Gallery on July 8th.

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Max Eternity (ME): Hi Larry

Larry Richard (LR): Hi Max

ME: In 2008 we met online through an arts organization you founded, Common Ground (CG). You had a call-to-artist for an exhibition in China. I submitted a work and was accepted with a group of about 100 artists from 40 countries. Tell me about vision for Common Ground—why you created it?

LR: Sure, back in 2004 I was approached by the Americans for Graphic Art (AIGA) who knew of my background in promoting events, some of which had to do with technology and art. They came together with AIGA realizing that I have an interest in the cross-section of the visual arts and technology. The asked how would you feel about working with us to help artists in Cuba and the US who would use the internet to share their dream—their perspective across the divide–being so close yet so far away?

They asked for ideas, and asked if I could go to Cuba. They said sure, and I said…I’m in. I connected with the idea of increasing communication between art in the US and Cuba, with an event called Shared Dreams, part of the Cuban digital design exhibition in 2004/05/06. One of my ideas was to bring that concept to the US, and was told I couldn’t do that because the Bush administration would shut you right down.

I said I wanted to show art, and cleared some hurdles and we brought the exhibition to the US, selling posters (unsigned prints) donating the money to a non-profit that supports Cuban artist world wide.

It was at that moment when I realized that I could bring artists together despite all the boundaries. If I could do that, I would bring artists together to work on the environment, starting Common Ground in 2007. The positive response was overwhelming.

Larry Richard poses in front of the Huan Tie Museum in Beijing, 2008.

ME: “Merging art and Digital Media for a Healthy Planet” is the Common Ground motto. Tell me some ways, this is achieved.

LR: Well, in 3 ways. The most important ways is raising visibility and awareness in the media—a group of artist can have an impact to have a much larger visibility in the press. The second: through the sale of books and proceeds from the prints, donating money directly to 3 different non-profit organizations, World Wildlife Fund, Global Giving, and the Global Environmental Institute in China. The third way is something I’m calling leveraging corporate social responsibility. By that I mean for example, with Hewlett Packard as a supporter, we’re able to leverage directives given by almost every fortune 500 corporate board. Every one has a core directive–a corporate social reasonability directive, because every corporation wants to be seen as good corporate citizens demonstrating to shareholders and the public that they are good stewards. So we use that that leverage to offer them an opportunity to be that by supporting CG—technology and the environment by giving us the ability to have a platform.

We give artist a way to express themselves about the environment, and give corporations a way to prove their good corporate citizenship.

“Time of Rethinking” by Li Tiejun

ME: And about yourself, where did you grow up?

LR: In Los Angeles

ME: Were environmental concerns always important to you, and who influenced you in this direction?

LR: Yes, being a Californian I live at the beach. I have camped and hiked my entire life. I’ve been a longtime supporter of environmental organizations for many, many years. For most of my adult life I’ve been passionate about the environment. One of the reasons that galvanized my passion was when I had a granddaughter–to imagine my going camping with them, going to the beach. It would be such a loss to not have them experience the passion for a clean environment that I feel. If I can do anything to make sure they have clean rivers, oceans, skies and food. I’ll do all I can. They are a good reason to make me maintain my passion about the environment.

“Common Ground” by Victor Raphael & Clayton Spada

ME: Before CG, you were experienced in organizing for various causes and missions?

LR: Two things: back in 1996 I produced an exposition trade show here in LA called Online Expo. Think back, most of us had no idea about what the World Wide Web was to become. But, I knew it was about to explode. So I gathered corporate sponsors like Sun, ADM and Microcenter and rented an L.A. convention center to create the event. 35,000 people attended. We were talking about what the online world would be like for business and the consumer. That was my introduction to producing an event that had to do with technology, bringing that to the public.

Many years before that, I produced a touring exhibition of photography back in 1989-1992, called the Fine Art Collection of Dezo Hoffmann. His claim to fame was he was the personal private photographer to the Beetles. This was way before digital. The original negatives were owned by his family that had passed to someone in Australia. I went and negotiated rights to have the North American rights for distribution for signed and certified prints for this exhibition.

That’s the background that brought it all together.

“Hovering Child” by Fran Forman

“Ribs Cage” by Iv Toshain

“Miami” by Amalia Pellegrini

“Ec(h)o” by Peter Boyadjieff

ME: I see so much overlap happening these days—artists becoming entrepreneurs, community organizers becoming environmental activists, writers becoming publishers and so forth. Is this something you observe as well; a new more dynamic business model?

LR: I guess the word overlap is good. Another word might be multiple-income streams, because, it’s not enough in this day and age to be an entrepreneur. It’s also about using that ability to identify a product or service to make money, and accomplish other good things…raising awareness. And money then gets donated for other good products.

If I can accomplish this, leveraging my talent and expertise while making money, and artists get to make money while donating some proceeds to environmental organizations, that makes a perfect storm for a good way to use my life, right for my own desk. I would never have thought 20 years ago that this would have been possible—integrating passion with my work.

Me Larry, thanks for your time.

LE: I’m very grateful that you took the time to speak with me.

“Mother Earth” by Karen Swaty

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To learn more about Larry Richard and Common Ground, click here. A full 3-year archive of AD MAG articles and interviews can be found here.

A graduate of the University of California, Andrew Huang got his start in art long before leaving high school. However, it was his short film mega-hit Doll Face, which generated world-wide acclaim and fame. Having gone viral on Youtube years ago, with several million hits, Doll Face is emblematic of Huang’s signature melding of live action, animation and CG visual effects. And while continuing to create a lush portfolio of pet projects, Huang is now in big demand, designing and directing commercials and music videos for a bevy of top-tier clientèle.

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Andy Huang’s Digital Face

CG Animation's New Boy Wonder

An Interview with Max Eternity

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Max Eternity (ME): Hi Andy, welcome to AD MAG.

Andrew Huang (AH): Hi Max.

ME: As far as I can tell, your rise to success came as a result of the Doll Face video that you created. I’ve watched it many times, he first time about a year ago. Tell me about that project.

AH: Yea, that is pretty significant. I made it in 2005-2006. I was at USC at the time, to study visual art, and to be near their film program. At the University of Southern California (USC) you could create anything in their curriculum, but they own it. So I did Doll Face outside of my schoolwork.

I was planning to go into animation, but I made it to show what I could do, not expecting to upload it online. I put it in SIGGRAPH in 2006 and the Annecy in France — a very big animation festival. I also put it on Youtube, and it went viral.

I wasn’t prepared for how much exposure it would get. But the Endeavor agency called me and that was that. A lot of opportunities came for me from that.

ME: Why do you think Doll Face resonates so intensely with viewers?

AH: Umm, I think it’s the visual, obviously. But also, it’s the content. It’s a narrative we can all relate to in various ways — about how commercialism really screws with us. I think it was just a theme that can be interpreted in so many ways, with gender and politics.

ME: And how did all this begin? Were you artistic as a child — who influenced you?

AH: Yea, I think I drew and painted mostly. But in high school, I did some animation. I learned Lightwave and Maya when I was pretty young.

When I started doing fine art, I missed the other. I love the Muppets and Jim Henson. There are so many people that influence what I do, like Jean Pierre Jeunnet.

ME: When did film work fit in, the digital aspects to what you do? Did it come intuitively? Was it always there — the digital?

AH: I think, it was one of the cheapest ways to do what I wanted to do and have it look realistic — the digital, I mean. I can animate, control the lighting and all with software, without having to create a film in the traditional sense, with actors and all that. I can make it look posh on a budget. People think if you do animation and graphics, you’re techie, but I still don’t know, really, how a computer works. I can’t take a PC apart and put it back together.

I wanted to work at Rhythm and Hue. I went there when I was a kid. And they told me that I needed to know how to draw and paint to work in effects.

You have to have a good eye to know what is going to look good.

You’re always learning how to use new software, but your ability to make an image stays the same IF you can draw and paint.

ME: You do art films and commercial projects as well, like music videos. Do you find it constrains you artistically when creating a product for a commercial audience? How do you balance the art with being commissioned to create a “product?”

AH: Yea, I’m still kinda learning how to do that, to be honest. That’s why I do so many videos, to have flexibility. But even then, it’s a reality that no one escapes. I think, um, I don’t know.

I do a lot of videos, and the commercial is very challenging, always finding a new technique, a visual grab — maybe I can change an angle, or use a standout technique. You have to look at everything as problem solving, as long as you are being challenged and doing something new. But, I always have my personal projects in the back of my mind.

Screenshot from AVI Buffalo’s “What’s In It For”

ME: I really like the video you did for AVI Buffalo, much better than the music they create, to be honest. The music’s not bad, per se, but it’s the visuals that caught my eye. Can you talk about that video, where did the ideas come from — the giant, floating jellyfish and the plants that look like organic jewelry?

AH: Um, well actually, I came up with the idea because I was looking at different photographs of slime molds — the beautiful structures that they form. AVI Buffalo is the really young band from Long Beach. So I thought to do this kinda photography, like the movie Fantastica Planet, to make things look surrealistic, like coral reefs. I was also looking at the work from Ernst Haeckel, who did these beautiful jelly fish drawings. So we built these jelly fish puppets, and it miraculously came out.

I like the band and the label. The video was a combination of puppetry and CG animation.

ME: Are you primarily a script writer, filmmaker or director? I ask because you create photorealistic CG animation, which is very painterly. I see lots of colorfield and color theory in your work. In other words, how do you describe your work, the role(s) you play in bringing it to life?

AH: I think I just have to say I’m a visual artist, because the word director is kinda of a 90’s concept. A director now day’s is so similar to a graphic artist. I’m not a bad writer, but not a great writer.

I wish I could be more an actor’s director. That’s kinda what I want to work on, but I’m definitely more of a visual artist.

ME: You have many videos on your website. In addition to Doll Face, The Gloamer really caught my eye — haunting, edgy, lush — fabulous. Talk about that if you will.

AH: Yea, um, I was really thinking it would be fun to do a horror film. But, I’m scared of horror films. They freak me out because of my very active imagination. But I think I would have a blast making horror films. So I made that film.

I wanted to do a live action, animation combination, but couldn’t afford an actual camera, so I shot everything on stills.

I came up with this narrative of this guy working late at night. I like Hitchcock, so I used crows — ratty looking crows.

That project was just pure fun; I just wanted to do something visually fun.

ME: What would you say to someone who’s looking to get into your line of work — to a high school student, for instance?

AH: I think I’d say take a lot of drawing classes. From there if you can draw the figure, it opens up a lot of skills, and gets into art history. You gotta start there.

As far as the digital, take the time to learn Photoshop. Take the time to learn Flash. You will find it’s extremely useful. It’s not easy.

You can learn on you own, or go to college, but the drawing has to come first. The digital tools are there, it’s a language to get it done, but ultimately you won’t be able to communicate your ideas unless you do that art first.

And, I’m still learning too, struggling to find out what kind of work I want to make, what’s my voice — what kind of brand I want to create for myself — it never really stops.

Doll Face was done 5 years ago, and I almost don’t relate to it now, because I did so long ago. I’m in a very different place artistically, but I’m glad it’s still appreciated.

AD MAG is an online magazine documenting the creative developments of artists that work exclusively in the digital realm, as well as those creative persons who fall into the TADAE fine art subset. With the mission of this publication being to present an accurate representation of the professional aspects still ... Continue reading →